Baltimore Heritage

Join us for a virtual tour of the Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum as part of Doors Open Baltimore 2020. The museum tells the story of Baltimore's leadership in the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of the freedom fighting activism of Lillie Carroll Jackson, the president of the Baltimore NAACP for 35 years in the early 20th century, the Jackson-Mitchell family, and their allies. The tour will be led by award-winning curator and program planner, Dr. Iris Leigh Barnes. Dr. Barnes teaches at the University of Delaware and serves on the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Morgan State University.

While few remember the slogan of the Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Company—“If you keep late hours for Society’s sake Bromo-Seltzer will cure that headache”—the iconic Bromo-Seltzer Tower has been a Baltimore landmark since its construction in 1911. At fifteen stories, the tower made the Bromo-Seltzer factory the tallest building in the city. The tower boasted a four-dial gravity clock that was the largest in the world (bigger, even, than London’s Big Ben) and was topped by a 51-foot revolving replica of the blue Bromo-Seltzer bottle, which was illuminated with 596 lights and could be seen 20 miles away.